Thursday, November 29, 2012

I was looking through my collection of 19th century trade cards and noticed that I had several issued by the J. C. Ayer Company.

Small wonder, for Ayer's was one of the most successful American patent medicines of the 1800s. As you can see by the reverse of this charming card for pills, the company made very wide claims (below).

Yes, this dinner pill will cure jaundice, numbness and headaches! As you can see in the next image, Ayer's Sarsaparilla is a remedy for so much more:

I'm not sure if there was much difference between Ayer's Sarsaparilla and Ayer's Cherry Pectoral.

yosemiteantiques.com

Dr. James Cook Ayer (1818-1878) graduated from medical school at the University of Pennsylvania, and rather than practice medicine, he spent his life in pharmaceutical chemistry. He established a factory in Lowell, Massachusetts, and through his very successful merchandising, amassed a fortune of more than $20,000,000.

Ayer's medicines — which certainly have the ring of quackery — were in fact continually evolving formulas, to the extent that after the passage of the 1906 Pure Food and Drugs Act, the J. C. Ayer Company was able to remain in business. In fact, the company continued selling medicines through the 1920s.

richardhowe.com

Dr. Ayer adopted the image of the lion as a symbol of health and strength, and his cemetery monument with a giant marble lion is now a Lowell landmark. To see what happens to the Ayer lion in winter, go here..

20 comments:

Dear Mark,Dr. Ayer is a fascinating subject (wow-- $20 million in sasparilla!!), but I have to say, that trade card with the naked babies packaging the cathartic pills is priceless!!! Advertising now is such a bore in comparison, isn't it?! I could look at that image with a smile all day long: it's so sweet, yet creepy. Fantastic! I'm going to send a link to this post to the painter Beverly Fishman, who did a great series of paintings in the shape of pills. I also enjoyed seeing the lion's winter house-- so much more elegant than the canvas drape I expected to see... Another wonderful post, Mark--thanks so much!Warm regards,Erika

It's interesting that you see both the sweetness and creepiness in the trade card with the naked babies (or perhaps cupid wannabes). I have collected these trade cards for decades, and in the process noticed a plethora of unclad children used in Victorian advertising. I've come to the conclusion that the Victorians were so uptight about nudity in general (this was, after all, a time when the sight of a lady's ankle was shocking), that depicting children in this way was a huge collective release! But that's just my own theory.

Dear Mark, That last trade card, "The Fight for the Standard" couldn't sell an Ayer Pill in this market. However, if you have an Ayer pill or two lying around your house, I would appreciate it if you would send it to me. I'll pay big.

I love the VIctorian influence! From the pill box design and tea cup style of the second photo to that wonderful asian inspired men's smoking jacket. I love the design on it.The story on the lion is interesting as well!

Hello Mark, The way the Victorians exploited child labor, some of the real factory workers might not have been that much older. Distortion of scale adds to the strange effect of that baby card. The pills are much larger than the children, which I somehow accept as supplying the scale, yet the very standard marble-topped parlor table is much smaller, while the bowl is huge. Only the small red cup (gluepot?) and brush match the babies.

Now that you focused our attention on the packaging in the ads, I noticed the miniature cork-screws already supplied in the bottles. Mostly these were plain wire, but sometimes you come across one stamped with the name of the medicine.

My favorite detail in this series has to be the two hands pouring out the Cherry Pectoral. --Road to Parnassus

One of my joys in collecting trade cards is to see how current advertising gimmicks harken back to Victorian times. Playing with scale was common on trade cards, and many of them have little people crawling over monumental products.

I noticed the corkscrew, too, and wonder whether it didn't actually screw but instead served as a handy means of yanking out the cork in one motion.

What a wonderful insight these 19th century trade cards are, not only for their social history but also the gullibility of we humans. The placebo effect as we now know is very powerful, no doubt this is what made Dr. Ayre his fortune.The placebo effect is in evidence on the card showing the Deacon in his snazzy dressing gown/ smoking jacket with Liza - when he says 'Land sake Liza, just the sight of the bottle makes me feel like another man'.Great card collection Mark.

Dear Rosemary - I'm glad you liked the cards. Incidentally, I've consulted measuringworth.com about Ayer's fortune, and his worth in today's American dollars would be approximately $400,000,000, and that's a conservative estimate!